


Prends Temps

by kvikindi



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Gen, M/M, gen-ish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-05
Updated: 2014-04-05
Packaged: 2018-01-18 05:45:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1417285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kvikindi/pseuds/kvikindi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Spring has no single color in Paris.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Prends Temps

**Author's Note:**

  * For [duckwhatduck](https://archiveofourown.org/users/duckwhatduck/gifts).



  
Spring has no single color in Paris. It arrives like a sunrise, from the East, in tones and little movements of color. A shy animal stirring from sleep. Each year Valjean acquires more knowledge about it. This year he hears birds beginning to sing. More birds, a whole sweet rambling chorus. They had not been there previously. He had not been aware of their absence. He thinks back: to Montreuil-sur-Mer, farther. He cannot remember. He says to Fauchelevent, "The birds have increased."

"Well, after all, Father Madeleine, they like to live where it's warm!" Fauchelevent laughs his creaking laugh. He rests his old hands at the top of a spade. "Don't we all! Don't we!"

Valjean has not considered it could be so easy, before: you didn't like where you lived, so you picked up to leave. It has always seemed to him much more difficult. He is large. He has such a heavy body. He watches sparrows flit from branch to branch. They quarrel like children, constantly mobile. They are fitful, and always full of joy. They move almost weightlessly.

The earth of the garden is increasingly disrupted. Winter plants so often are lonely creatures. They are careful. They must be: there is so little room for error. But spring-- well, spring has its too-early blossoms, lost to some late freeze; then its re-blossoms, just as bold and incautious. Its first shoots, greedy, siphon the sun. It spreads its wildflowers so freely.

And so weeding is a task of the gardener in springtime: sorting out which new plants to keep, which buds will bear the later fruit of summer. It is a task at which he is gifted. Year after year Fauchelevent asks him for the secret: how tell, without digging up the whole earth, the good plant from the weed? (How tell which trees will make fine grafts? How smell when ice is in the air? "Ah! I should have stayed in the country longer," Fauchelevent says mournfully.) Valjean cannot explain. There is no certain pattern. Or: one he once spent a lifetime learning.

Fauchelevent has many questions. Not the practical questions. Not the where-did-you-go, well-then-what-happened. He will cross one wool-stockinged foot over another, clay pipe clenched in his teeth, and stare into the fire for a little while before asking meditatively, "Tell me then, Father Madeleine, what about a man who is bound to bad fortune?" This would be the invitation not to a philosophical inquiry, but to a recounting of all the men whom Fauchelevent had known who had been bound to bad fortune. The tale would take an amusing turn, inevitably. Or it would begin there: "Ah! You will not believe what one of those little devils, that is to say one of the young ladies, asked me..."

Winter in the outbuilding is an isolation, not of one but of the one that two can become. Valjean grows used to the smell of pipe-smoke. To the sound of a body rustling. They do not speak all that much, in the long hours. That is, not more than is usual for them. Yet in the spring there is this silence. A space where another voice had been.

In the orchard, he can measure-- when the snow melts-- the years of his life at the convent. He can see where the grafts are healing over: no longer two trees bound together, nor one tree holding the other's weight, but a single body. The skin is tough. The fruit will be good. Everything heals, everything grows, if you give it time for the graft to take.

"What kind of fruit will we have this year, Father Madeleine?" Fauchelevent asks him, joking, when the first buds form on the apple-branches. They once had a tree bear red and green apples. A confusion, and yet: a miraculous appearance.

"Wait and see, Father Fauchelevent. Wait and see."

And when the melons are growing, big on their vines, but still nascent, still heavy and green: "We must take care to set aside a seed-stock. After the harvesting. It was that big a frost, in April, oh! it ate up our poor melons, our precious chicks."

Valjean holds a melon in his tough-skinned hands. Already, inside, the seeds are forming: the seeds that will flower in melons to come. The fruit of the orchard is already on the trees. In him, too, is all of his self, all of the self he will ever be. "Yes," he says. "We must not forget next winter."

Next winter: the future: a certain, physical thing.

He lies awake as the sun meekly milkens the dark air. The birds in the orchard are all caroling. Each one has a lone and deliberate song. And yet it is not a cacophony. Somehow it grows only sweeter and sweeter. And then: as the light lifts: Fauchelevent grumbling, stumping about on uneven feet. The sound of a bell. The drawing of water. A low fire struck and kindling. Valjean used always to think of Cosette upon waking, and he does still, he does-- but now he thinks: _did I have a self, that could think of Cosette?_

He lets himself waken in that little darkness. He is conscious of himself, waking.


End file.
